Fifty days later, in the same way God descended from heaven to dwell with His people in Sinai, God Himself descended again to dwell with the people of God at Pentecost. But unlike the Old Testament version, where the people needed to remain far off from God because of the finished work of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God would not remain distant but would live even within the heart of every believer. This was the chief end that the Festival of Weeks always pointed to: God living with His people forever. 

Eschatological Blue Diamonds
All diamonds are beautiful and rare. They are formed as a collection of carbon atoms, subjected to unimaginable heat and pressure over the space of time, melding into one of nature’s greatest crystalline masterpieces that has ever captivated the eyes of man. Some diamonds, such as the standard white diamond, are easier to find, occurring nearer to the surface of the earth in the alluvial deposits and within volcanic pipes, which makes them more abundant and affordable in the market. Other diamonds, however, such as the elusive blue diamond, are buried much deeper within the earth’s strata, making them not only harder to extract but also rarer and more costly.
In the same way, every truth learned from Scripture is precious and essential. Some truths hang right on the surface of the text and do not take much digging to lodge them loose. Other truths, however, take a bit of digging. Yet, the reward for peeling back the layers of Scriptural strata is most definitely worth the reward for all who will venture into its depths.
This is a good way of thinking about our passage today. Many of you will be familiar with some truths on the surface. These truths are precious and glorious, and I do not want to minimize them. But, if you will grab your shovel and pickaxe, I’d like to take you down just a bit further, below the surface and into the eschatological crust of the text, as we hunt for the Biblical equivalent of blue diamonds.
The Text: Acts 2:1-12
1 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.2 And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.5 Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. 6 And when this sound occurred, the crowd came together, and were bewildered because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language. 7 They were amazed and astonished, saying, “Why, are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born? 9 Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them in our own tongues speaking of the mighty deeds of God.” 12 And they all continued in amazement and great perplexity, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”
To understand this text, let us first consider what eschatology is and how this text is eschatological.
Expanding Our Definition
As we covered last week, we are in a series on eschatology where we are working our way through the eschatological texts found throughout the New Testament, having found ourselves currently in Luke’s second book, called Acts. This will require stopping and staring at the various eschatological passages and building a coherent end-times theology from this great book. To do that, we will need a proper definition of what eschatology is.
First, eschatology is not merely about the final climactic moments of human history. That is a futurist’s perversion. Instead, eschatology is about what life will look like during the final age of man. Eschatology is about how the history of planet earth will be brought under the rule and dominion of Jesus Christ in these last days we are living in. That end-time age began when Jesus Christ rose from the dead and poured out His Spirit upon all flesh, which we will see in greater detail next week.
But for now, it is crucial to understand that everything within the old covenant, all of the promises of God, all of the types and shadows, will either pass away under the rule of Christ or will soar to its climax in the rule of Christ. In this way, eschatology has just as much to do with fulfilling the past as it does with the future. Thus, eschatology is trying to understand how all of the old forms and norms will find their ultimate realization and transformation in the new covenant that Christ has ushered in. To say that in shorthand: eschatology is how Christ ushers in His end-time Kingdom, now in part, one day in full.
To that end, let us explore a few examples, beginning with Pentecost.
Pentecost and the Festal Calendar
Pentecost comes from the Greek word πεντηκοστή, which means “the fiftieth” or “the fiftieth day,” referring to the fact that the miraculous outpouring of the Holy Spirit happened fifty days after the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday. Yet, the origins of Pentecost and the other key events during Holy Week run much deeper than the first century AD.
For instance, underneath the events of Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost are buried Old Covenant feasts that directly and chronologically correlate with what Christ is doing. Take, for example, the festival called Passover. This feast was the first among the final three feasts in the Jewish year. During that feast, a lamb was slaughtered for the people’s sins, and its blood was painted on the doorpost of every home so that the angel of death would pass over them. As Christians, we look to Christ as the final and perfect Lamb, whose blood was painted over the mantle of our own hearts, causing the angel of death to pass us over so that we may inherit eternal life in the Son.
Likewise, underneath the events of Easter and Christ’s resurrection was a Jewish festival immediately following Passover called “First Fruits.” In that feast, the people would praise and worship God for the first sign of the harvest, that once more He had caused the seeds that went down into the earth dead to sprout and break through the ground again, symbolizing new life and resurrection from the dead. When Jesus rose from the dead, during the celebration of this festival, He was not only claiming to be God; He was fulfilling an Old Covenant rite with precision and beauty.
In the same way, underneath the events of Pentecost was an Old Covenant norm that must be explored if we are going to understand what God is doing in Acts 2. After the Passover and the festival of First Fruits, the Israelites hightail it out of Egypt and travel ferociously towards the Red Sea. After God’s final and glorious showdown with Pharoah, the Israelites continue to Sinai, where God leaves His throne in heaven and descends upon the mountain to dwell with His people. The journey from celebrating the First Fruits in Egypt to seeing Yahweh descend upon the mountain and deliver His law to Moses took exactly fifty days (Just like Pentecost).
To commemorate that arduous fifty-day journey, God established a feast called the Festival of Weeks (Shavuot in Hebrew), which would become one of the three mandatory pilgrimage festivals that all Jewish males were required to attend once a year in Jerusalem. Furthermore, within the ordinary annual calendar of the Jews, this feast was the last and final celebration of the year, spiritually symbolizing how God’s ultimate and final purpose in redemption was to condescend and draw His sojourning people into His presence forever.
This is why the timing of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 is so rich and eschatologically significant. All of the events that happen during holy week and Pentecost track perfectly along with the Old Testament Festal calendar. This is not by accident or mere coincidence. God is purposefully taking His Son through each of the final feasts of Israel to show His people how His Son is the end and point that each of these feasts was pointing to.
In the same way, God rescued His people from the Pharaoh and their taskmasters in Egypt, Heaven’s spotless Lamb came and offered Himself during the final Passover, freeing the people of God from a far worse tyrant than Pharoah. In Christ, we have been set free from the wicked rule of Satan, the slavery of our own sinful flesh, and the bonds of death that once accosted us. He is the hope the Passover was always pointing to.
Immediately after Christ fulfilled the Passover, He fulfilled the feast of First Fruits, being the first fruit of a new creation, being the first to rise from the ground, breaking out of the earth like the first barley harvest the people were worshiping God for. In this, Christ (the bread of life) became the first one to rise in the new covenant Kingdom. And through His power, He is bringing all His people back to life and out of the grave until the entire harvest has come in. He is the hope the feast of Firstfruits was always pointing to.
Then, fifty days later, in the same way God descended from heaven to dwell with His people in Sinai, God Himself descended again to dwell with the people of God at Pentecost.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Ian J. Vaillancourt |
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
The Old Testament is bookended with genealogy-heavy books, and these books take their interpretive cues from Genesis 3:15. As we move to the New Testament, we discover that it begins with…a genealogy. 

The Lineage of Redemption
The scene is familiar to many of us: we wake up in the morning with an awareness of our need for the word of God. We want to see the world through the lens of the word, and we want to be led into prayer by the word. We are also conscious of the limited time we have before the demands of our day creep in, so we roll over, grab our Bible, and open to the place we left off the day before. And we read:
This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died. (Gen. 5:1–5)
Okay, we tell ourselves, that first bit felt about as edifying as reading the phone book, but let’s keep reading: “When Seth had lived 105 years, he fathered Enosh. Seth lived after he fathered Enosh 807 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died” (Gen. 5:6–8). At this point we begin to panic, and our fears are confirmed as our eyes scan down the page. This is an entire chapter of genealogy, of births and deaths and really long lifespans. We had wanted the voice of Scripture to be crisp and clear, an encounter with the living God at the beginning of our day. But instead we are experiencing a muted voice that is easy to ignore.1 As we survey the book of Genesis, we find three chapters devoted entirely to genealogies (Gen. 5; 10; 36). That is a lot of “phone book” reading!

In this common scene from our personal Bible reading, it is possible that our understanding of Scripture led us to anticipate an encounter with God. After all, we know that “the word of God is living and active” (Heb. 4:12). And we also know that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man [or woman, or boy, or girl] of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). As our approach to every passage of Scripture is informed by the Bible’s own teaching about itself, we realize that any time we fail to encounter God in the Bible, the problem is with us, not the Bible.

In light of this, is there any hope that reading a biblical genealogy can lead us to encounter God? The (perhaps surprising) answer is yes, but first we need to learn about the purpose of these passages. The Bible tells the grand story of redemption, and genealogies (or general statements of family lineage) in Genesis sketch the lineage of redemption. To help us get a handle on these surprisingly important passages, we are going to unpack four truths about the genealogies in Genesis before looking forward to Christ in light of them.
1. Genesis 3:15 is the key to understanding the family lineage passages in the rest of the book.
As a part of his curse on the serpent, YHWH God said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). Not only is this the first glimmer of gospel hope in the entire Bible, but in the context of this discussion of genealogies, notice that it also points to two lineages.2
It is understandable that the horrible scene from Genesis 3 would produce conflict between the serpent (the deceiver) and the woman (the deceived). However, YHWH God took it a step further by extending the conflict to the “offspring” (or seed) of the serpent and the “offspring” (or seed) of the woman. In other words, there will be a lineage for the serpent and a lineage for the woman, and they will be in conflict with one another. Ultimately, the offspring of the woman will “bruise” (or crush) the head of the offspring of the serpent, and the offspring of the serpent will “bruise” (or crush) the heel of the offspring of the woman.
When we understand Genesis 3:15, we can turn back to the book of Genesis and notice that the verse begins to get “filled out” in this fifty-chapter book. As the first glimmer of gospel hope, Genesis 3:15 teaches us that when we read through Genesis, we ought to be looking for the offspring of the serpent and the offspring of the woman. Now we can see how statements of family lineage in Genesis may be significant! Before we explain this further, it is important to understand the structure of Genesis.
2. Genesis is framed around ten statements of family lineage.
In our Bibles, chapters and verses are helpful. But chapters and verses were not a part of the original Bible manuscripts. They were added later as a helpful way of “getting on the same page,” but they were not inspired. As we approach the book of Genesis, we find that its original author (Moses) framed it around two halves and ten sections. This is a part of the original shape of the book.
As we look at the big picture of Genesis, we find that its first “half” is found in Genesis 1:1–11:26. These chapters record what biblical scholars refer to as “primordial history.” The term primordial refers to the beginning of time, so primordial history refers to all of history from creation to the fall to the flood to the Tower of Babel.
Read More
Related Posts:

It is a dangerous way of thinking to consider ourselves outside the need of the means of grace, outside the call to sanctification. Often we do not take advantage of worship, prayer meetings, the Sabbath Day, singing, etc… because we don’t think we need it. Brothers and sisters, if this catechism question teaches us anything it is the simple message that we need Jesus, and to especially experience the free offer of His forgiveness, daily, weekly, regularly, through the reminder offered in the Holy Spirit’s ministering labors.

Today is going to be the last post for 2023. I am taking the week between Christmas and New Year’s off and we’ll come back with WLC Q.150-151 on January 4, 2024, and then the Tuesday devotion will return January 9, 2024. As we continue the Tuesday/Thursday blogs I want to thank you for reading them. I never talk about it in this space, but over the last year the readership of this Substack has doubled, and that doesn’t count the folks who take this in other forms and places. I am grateful, and humbled, you consider the reading of the Tuesday/Thursday posts worth your time and it is my goal to continue to write these for the foreseeable future. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact me at your leisure. Likewise, after we conclude the Larger Catechism in August (d.v.) this Thursday space will be taken up with a to-be-determined confession, same chronological format. It has been without a doubt helpful for me as a pastor and as a Christian to be reminded of the richness of the Reformed faith as it has been summarized by our forefathers.
Again, thank you for reading. The responses and commitments I have already received from people are a blessing in and of themselves. Y’all have a blessed rest of 2023.
Now to the Q/A:
Q. 149: Is any man able perfectly to keep the commandments of God?
A. No man is able, either of himself, or by any grace received in this life, perfectly to keep the commandments of God; but doth daily break them in thought, word, and deed.
Having completed the ten our Divines now come to the first use of the law. They have, in various ways, mostly by the what/why/how structure of the catechism’s take on the commandments, already in some sense done this. However, they want to always ensure that as we as believers are molded and formed into the image of God so that we do not forget that at its base the law acts as a mirror for us. In other words, the more the law is in our eyes the more we see the glory and perfection of the person of our Lord, and by that our inability to either match-up with Him in His holiness or keep the law perfectly in order to be saved is made known to us.
It is important for believers to never fail to recall that we are sinners, even after the historical application of the redemption purchased by Christ. Read Romans 7, or Romans 3 for that matter. We still struggle with the old man within us and when we cease to fight, we will be crushed by the weight of it. Romans 6 of course is taken up with recoiling against the idea that the free grace granted in justification (Romans 5) means we no longer need to follow the law, that we can be antinomians, that is outside the law. We are never away from the content of the ten commandments.
Read More
Related Posts: